That’s Daryl on the left

There are not many songs about engineers. I don’t mean engineer in the American sense – the guy driving an old steam locomotive, face black with coal dust, desperate to get the Ol’ 97 into Spencer on time. I mean the sort of engineer who sits at a draft board, pencils and protractor at hand, designing houses and bridges and viaducts and such.

My brother is an engineer of that sort, and so was my late father. And so, from time to time, the profession of engineering comes up in conversation. When it does, my wife, who enjoys singing, will often burst forth with:

I wanna be an engineer, my friend
I wanna be an engineer

And this is the sort of engineer who inspects concrete slabs.

The song is a childhood memory. As a girl my wife had a record called Hey! Hey! It’s Darryl and Ossie. “Daryl” was Daryl Somers, and Ozzie was an ostrich, or at least a puppet thought to resemble one. That’s Daryl on the left. The two were big on Australian television for the best part of twenty years.

I found a copy of Hey! Hey!, and my wife was very excited, but we found that the Unpasteurised Milk Paradigm applies to this, as to most comedy. Wonderful fresh, but it doesn’t last. Still, there is nostalgia value, and in honour of my family connections I have to play this track: quite possibly the only song ever written about civil engineering.